The Postmodern era: Did it happen?
The 'postmodern condition' was coined to describe the fall of metanarratives after the two world wars (or between them, depending on what you count). The story goes something like this...
In the centuries prior to the Great War, Europe was dominated by certain narratives that dictated its outlook to some extent and in turn drove its behaviours. Empire and colonialism had a pretty good showing: make the world a better place by making it more like home. Religion got on board with it all, bringing the gift of Jesus to the world by preacher or by sword. The idea of the state was personified or even deified.
Probably the most potent narrative of the 19th century was that science and technology would make the world perfect: the so-called technological Utopia. Flying machines, submarines, great feats of civil engineering.
The theory goes that this came crashing down when we saw the horrors of two world wars. Empires started shedding their colonies in self-disgust. The machines of war created an unshakable image of a technological dystopian future. The rightness of a great nation could no longer be assumed. And where exactly was God in all of this?
Famous postmodern authors like Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon fought in the war and came out of it somewhat nihilistic about language itself or language in the hands of the powerful or the vested.
Two ideologies remained to fight it out: one largely untethered from its metanarrative (communism) and instead tethered to a judicious choice of allegiance; the other a kind of anti-narrative in which society was replaced by a jumble of individuals, symbols for real objects were replaced with symbols that refer to nothing whatsoever, machines of war were turned against one's own people rather than external enemies, and a historic purpose was replaced by instantaneousness: post-war capitalism.
Perhaps the most profound change of perspective in the West after the war was the state and commerce's coordinated shift from thinking of its own populace in terms of manpower to thinking of it in terms of targets. People were replaced by consumers, the sole purpose of whom was to work to create luxuries that hostile propaganda insisted they needed and therefore would buy. Salary became the basic resource of the West, and profit became its endgame, putting a single symbol with a waning referent at both ends and at every point in between, and turning society into a conversation commerce was having with itself about nothing at all. The reason was obvious; we were bankrupt.
But the mode was quite bewildering. With first the advent of TV then of computing, we became awash with information that was contradictory. You need this thing you don't need. You want this thing you've never wanted. Your betters use this brand of product that your betters wouldn't be seen dead buying. There is no evidence of this thing you see every day. I have never met this person I had sex with. I did not say the thing I said. Alternative facts. They are not prisoners of war, they are enemy combatants, so torture is good. Facts are fake news. Channel 8 to believe X. Channel 21 to believe ~X. We can't offer you truth, but we can offer you _choice_.
We are willing to save the planet. But not at the expense of the consumer.
McCarthyism taught us to doubt our neighbours, a handy leg-up for individualism and isolationism. Nixon taught us that government is a kind of criminal activity. We have uncountable postwar conspiracy theories about aliens, missing flights, 9/11, black helicopters, chem trails, vaccines, elections, and, of course, Jews. Alternative facts are everywhere while actual facts have little value to most people because there is no objective, neutral authority they would accept.
This was the postmodern condition described by Lyotard in his infamous book, built upon by Baudrillard in Simulcra and Simulation, made almost a science by Derrida. First and foremost, postmodernism is supposed to be a description of the world, particularly what was happening with information, so the first question about the postmodernism condition has to be: did it ever happen? Or did nothing actually change and it's just a bunch of humanities losers justifying their own jobs? Or did the postmodernists actually cause the thing they said was already happening?
Some naysayers culled lazily from Wikipedia, pasted without annotation for contrast, limited to those that state that the postmodern era never happened or was caused by postmodernism itself:
In the centuries prior to the Great War, Europe was dominated by certain narratives that dictated its outlook to some extent and in turn drove its behaviours. Empire and colonialism had a pretty good showing: make the world a better place by making it more like home. Religion got on board with it all, bringing the gift of Jesus to the world by preacher or by sword. The idea of the state was personified or even deified.
Probably the most potent narrative of the 19th century was that science and technology would make the world perfect: the so-called technological Utopia. Flying machines, submarines, great feats of civil engineering.
The theory goes that this came crashing down when we saw the horrors of two world wars. Empires started shedding their colonies in self-disgust. The machines of war created an unshakable image of a technological dystopian future. The rightness of a great nation could no longer be assumed. And where exactly was God in all of this?
Famous postmodern authors like Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon fought in the war and came out of it somewhat nihilistic about language itself or language in the hands of the powerful or the vested.
Two ideologies remained to fight it out: one largely untethered from its metanarrative (communism) and instead tethered to a judicious choice of allegiance; the other a kind of anti-narrative in which society was replaced by a jumble of individuals, symbols for real objects were replaced with symbols that refer to nothing whatsoever, machines of war were turned against one's own people rather than external enemies, and a historic purpose was replaced by instantaneousness: post-war capitalism.
Perhaps the most profound change of perspective in the West after the war was the state and commerce's coordinated shift from thinking of its own populace in terms of manpower to thinking of it in terms of targets. People were replaced by consumers, the sole purpose of whom was to work to create luxuries that hostile propaganda insisted they needed and therefore would buy. Salary became the basic resource of the West, and profit became its endgame, putting a single symbol with a waning referent at both ends and at every point in between, and turning society into a conversation commerce was having with itself about nothing at all. The reason was obvious; we were bankrupt.
But the mode was quite bewildering. With first the advent of TV then of computing, we became awash with information that was contradictory. You need this thing you don't need. You want this thing you've never wanted. Your betters use this brand of product that your betters wouldn't be seen dead buying. There is no evidence of this thing you see every day. I have never met this person I had sex with. I did not say the thing I said. Alternative facts. They are not prisoners of war, they are enemy combatants, so torture is good. Facts are fake news. Channel 8 to believe X. Channel 21 to believe ~X. We can't offer you truth, but we can offer you _choice_.
We are willing to save the planet. But not at the expense of the consumer.
McCarthyism taught us to doubt our neighbours, a handy leg-up for individualism and isolationism. Nixon taught us that government is a kind of criminal activity. We have uncountable postwar conspiracy theories about aliens, missing flights, 9/11, black helicopters, chem trails, vaccines, elections, and, of course, Jews. Alternative facts are everywhere while actual facts have little value to most people because there is no objective, neutral authority they would accept.
This was the postmodern condition described by Lyotard in his infamous book, built upon by Baudrillard in Simulcra and Simulation, made almost a science by Derrida. First and foremost, postmodernism is supposed to be a description of the world, particularly what was happening with information, so the first question about the postmodernism condition has to be: did it ever happen? Or did nothing actually change and it's just a bunch of humanities losers justifying their own jobs? Or did the postmodernists actually cause the thing they said was already happening?
Some naysayers culled lazily from Wikipedia, pasted without annotation for contrast, limited to those that state that the postmodern era never happened or was caused by postmodernism itself:
William Lane Craig:The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unliveable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism!
Albrecht Wellmer:postmodernism at its best might be seen as a self-critical – a sceptical, ironic, but nevertheless unrelenting – form of modernism; a modernism beyond utopianism, scientism and foundationalism; in short a postmetaphysical modernism
Zimbabwean-born British Marxist Alex Callinicos says that postmodernism "reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of '68, and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right."
Comments (237)
There's a lot in your post, much of it quite interesting but I'd be skeptical. Rorty, for example, claimed that what was useful in postmodernism was already well established towards the end of the 19th century. Thomas Pynchon never described himself as a postmodernist, and he actually seemed to take jabs at the whole idea in his last book Bleeding Edge.
Lyotard eventually claimed that his Postmodern Condition was "a parody". I think it is much more useful to look at the development of the PR industry in the early 20th century to gain some insight into how powerful people thought about how to indoctrinate people, which forms a direct link between between irrational behavior all the way up to Q stuff.
Outside of books written by Stewart Ewen, Chomsky, Bernays and others, Adam Curtis has a few interesting documentaries on the subject, most notably The Century of the Self.
Having said that, I do think that it's fair to say that postmodernism was a movement in literature and philosophy I suppose, depending on how you view Derrida and company. But I don't think it was a historical epoch. So I can't answer the question you pose.
Interesting post though.
More shadows cast by Nietzsche's Death of God?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Is that post modernism, or just the result of ordinary cynicism and conventional scapegoating, the product of political failures and concentrated media ownership? I think the internet has simply helped to concentrate and organize some eternal problems.
Postmodernism is probably understood or 'used' by a handful of academics and badly understood by a few million self-appointed experts - film critics/amateur theorists/essayists/novelists/sitcom writers. I may be wrong but it seems to me that for much of the rest of the of the world po-mo is just a flickering bricolage with no coherence.
Digression - I re-read part one of Don Quixote recently and it showcases many of the alleged po-mo literary devices; parody, self-reflexivity, irony, pastiche, double coding and that was in 1605. This ancient novel showcases an astonishingly contemporary sensibility.
I think it can be summarized in this statement: postmodernism is (philosophical) scepticism on drugs.
I am not thinking of people like Michel Foucault, who actually had interesting ideas, but rather the authors criticised by Sokal and Bricmont in their “Fashionable Nonsense” (Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray,...)
Basically, I have not found in those postmodern authors anything that was not found already in philosophers like Sextus Empiricus and David Hume, who also expressed their ideas in a clear, non pedantic, non trivial and much more profound way.
Well, this one didn't age well .
Communism untethered to a metanarritive?
As I see it the meta-narratives only "fell" among a select group of academics. Outside of that "circle jerk" the meta-narrative of modernism is alive and kicking hard.
Perhaps there has been a postmodern movement (as opposed to a Movement) in the arts; where the mania for formal innovation has been surrendered in the face of vacuity, and an eclectic spirit that can find ideas and inspiration in past works has become accepted.
I don't think they caused it, but I think they quickly embodied to a parodical degree what they described: discourses on Truth revealing themselves to be, and devolving into, language games.
But these things rot from the head down. Scientism, secularism, humanism all began with the intellectual elites. But postmodernism is way past that stage. You only have to look at the last four years in America to see the mainstreaming of postmodernism in plain sight.
That sounds like an answer in the negative.
Quoting Tom Storm
Ordinary now. But ordinary at the time? Was it usual for Americans to distrust each other for no obvious reason before McCarthy? Was it usual to assume your President was engaged in criminality before Nixon?
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, this is well known. But then Hamlet was an existential play centuries before existentialism. It happens, especially with geniuses like Cervantes and Shakespeare.
Quoting hypericin
Rather that nominal communism was untethered from theoretical communism.
Quoting Janus
Well that's an interesting question. Within philosophy you'll find people who haven't really moved past Plato. Whether or not modernism ended for the masses, it would be naive to expect philosophers would cease to cling to it. But the question and your answer don't pertain to philosophers: what you're suggesting here is that people in general are as committed to the modernism project as ever, right?
I don't see postmodernism as being all that pervasive in philosophy, actually. Insofar as much of contemporary philosophy is scientistic, I think it would still qualify as modernism. And yes I do think people in general are as committed to the modernist project as ever.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's true, and is probably due to a reaction on the part of a few to the very idea of modernism, a kicking back against what is seen as an unwanted incursion of science into philosophy. Or they may just be fascinated by ancient ideas. :wink:
I'm interested in what makes you think so, and what aspects of it if it's not the whole.
Saying that nothing is objectively true, like a relativist, but then, rather than skeptically rejecting all claims, instead taking that to make all claims immune to skepticism, like a dogmatist, because they couldn't be objectively wrong either, just makes for a relativism that gives free reign to all forms of dogmatism, and a dogmatism that cloaks itself in relativistic armor.
Modernism aims for both objectivism and skepticism, but in order to succeed at that and not collapse into postmodernism it has to reject both the extremes of transcendent objectivism and the extremes of cynical (justificationist) skepticism, instead admitting only a phenomenal objectivism and merely criticism skepticism; only skeptical inasmuch as that means not dogmatic, and only objective inasmuch as that means not relativist.
I chose yes/before. This is my first exposure to the subject and I was favorably impressed with your description of the issue; so much so that I fell right in with the description of postmodernism so completely as to see it, not as a creation of those who might name it, but as a state of affairs that came about as a result of experience and was only then named. And I found the description of how it came to be and what it was to be so plausible as to be true; at least until someone better comes along to dispel it. The three naysayers, while thoughtful, failed to do that, at least in my mind. The more I think about what they said, the more it appears that they were just nitpicking and trying to be difficult and searching for readers. The first seems wrong on the relativism point, the second seems to be nuancing without distinguishing, and the third is too late.
Following the thread and learning.
Distrust, tyranny and corruption has taken place on and off during the history of the Republic. Lincoln abolished habeas corpus and shut down newspapers to control the press. Many Americans thought Lincoln was a devious tyrant. James Buchanan was seen during his time as a petty crook who chose a cabinet of famously corrupt men to advise him. Warren Harding was known as presiding over one of the most corrupt administrations in US history.
I mean there's many aspects to it. There's even something called postmodern architecture, based on deconstruction. But the idea would be, if you ask a historian, would they recognize something like the "postmodern era"? Not most that I'm aware of.
Also, aside from quoting Lyotard's disdain for "metanarratives" or just saying something like "it's all relativism", it's far from clear what postmodernism is supposed to include, as evidenced by your own excellent OP in terms of having to say a lot to even have a discussion about it.
I'm unsure about your view here, but, what I really dislike about po-mo, outside of much of the willful obscurantism found in many of its adherents, is that they think the enlightenment was a failure. Compared to how Europe was before the enlightenment, I think such a view is pretty wild. I don't think the enlightenment project will be finished, but to say it failed misses the mark.
Not that all of pomo is bad at all, Pynchon is an amazing writer, Rorty was quite clear and some of the Parisians, mostly Foucault, had interesting things to say.
It's just quite baffling that they never really gave a good response to Sokal and Bricmont's books or arguments.
I'll end my random thoughts here...
Self-disgust had nothing to do with it. Empires shed their empires because they could not hold on to them any longer. Then too, the natives were getting restless, never a good thing for the regime.
I am grateful that I got out of town before the wave of postmodern shit arrived.
which seems to me integral to modernity – humanist empirical skepticism-fallibilism always in danger of (a) relativism-nihilism or (b) technoscientism – and not some "condition" independent of, succeeding, the modern condition (1600(?)-present).
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Now that's something to think about. :up:
Loving it. I want to dumb this conversation down and saying something about a po-mo mo-fo but I'll save that for a later time when I can work "flickering bricolage" into a conversation. :cool:
I think that postmodernism definitely was important as a movement and it lead to a way of analysing meanings, especially in connection with the social construction of many aspects of reality. It aided in thinking about so many fabricated constructs, but, perhaps it went a bit too far, and may have given rise to the perspective where everything is reduced to mere social constructs. This may have lead to the possibility of post truth, and a whole agenda in which nothing can be taken for granted at all. So, in thinking about postmodernism, perhaps we need to think about what was helpful, or unhelpful, and where do we go from here?
I think you would first still need to agree that po-mo had provided a particular lens through which to view things. I am not sure this can be readily established. I really doubt the word has been used in a precise way by anyone, except, in earlier days to sex up pastiche and cynicism.
My own view of postmodernism is connected to sociology. In particular, I knew someone who thought of gender as being socially constructed. I thought how useful this was at the time . But, I also see the biological dimensions of gender. So, it may be about various lens, and how we explore and experiment with them until we find those which are both most accurate and helpful for our thinking.
I consider myself fortunate to have finished undergraduate studies before post-modernism thoroughly infected the University I was at; in those days, the intellectual scourge was Marxist political economics, which is related but distinct.
I have a good anthology, The Truth about the Truth, Walter Truett Anderson, bought after a recommendation on the older version of this forum. Compendium of essays by relevant heavyweights (my favourites were by Huston Smith and Vlaclav Havel).
BTW - if you don't know it already, check out https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ which generates random samples of pomo pseudo-text:
I doubt that it is valid, but I'll let it go. :grin:
There MUST be published papers written with this thing.
And I'm thinking, the period after post-modern is post-apocalypse. :yikes: Hope not.
It does seem strictly unknowable, like some kind of uncertainty principle of bullshit.
Well, spacetime is doomed, so why not?
Quoting Wayfarer
I was always taught (sociology, sorry) that postmodernism begins mid 20th Century, esp 1960's. I think the theory's slippery lack of specificity is telling and appropriately ironic. I guess you are trying to align it to a bigger picture.
:up: The absurd (re: Zapffe, Camus, Rosset, Murray, Brassier) is / has always been, it seems, the Human condition.
Cheers Janus. While the anti-vax lunatic fringe might disagree, I think most people would agree. By contrast, would you say that most people agree or disagree with the sentence: Our use of technology is causing a catastrophic global warming event?
While I anticipated that most experienced pomophobes wouldn't resist jumping the gun a tad, this is precisely why I've limited this first thread to the fundamental claim of pomo: that people lost their faith in grand narratives, unity, and authorities. What replaces these gets somewhat more contentious. Few of the noteworthy pomos were relativists, in fact many were Christians.
Quoting James Riley
Hell, what a responsibility! I hope I was accurate enough. On which...
Quoting Bitter Crank
"Self-disgust" is probably the wrong term, I agree. There were several reasons, finances not least. But here I was referring to the fact that, after Hitler, it was untenable to control those restless natives with force. We had told everyone that what the Nazis had done was evil, even though we'd just been doing it ourselves. Two years later, Britain ceded India. Not a coincidence.
Quoting Manuel
I hope to get on to this in a follow-up thread, but pomo culture is typically either post-marxist (which is why Jordan Peterson is a tool) or post-Freud. Check out the book Less Is A Bore for a sense of pomo architecture... It's basically anti-Marxist rather than deconstructive, but yeah there's some theory there too.
Quoting Manuel
After Sokal there was a period of bridge-building, inter-disciplinary conferences and workshops, probably the foundation of interdisciplinary university activity today if I can risk a grand narrative. Including Sokal iirc. He managed to stop being a douchebag in the end.
Quoting Tom Storm
Hopefully I've made the case that early pomo sapiens in language (Lyotard, Baudrillard) did have such a view, insofar as they observed a change in how people were using language, particularly in politics, advertising, universities, etc.
That's interesting. I agree that latter 'modern physics' could just as well be called 'postmodern physics'. Relativity de-centred the observer, embedding them in a mathematical language game (a reference frame) and insisted there was no special, objective, neutral position to judge those games (no special frames). Quantum mechanics replaced ontic objects with epistemic ones: replaced a ball rolling down an incline with 'everything we know about balls rolling down inclines', resulting in a plurality of future realities.
I'll stop here to savour us agreeing about something. It feels nice. :)
Quoting hypericin
https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01436-7
And these are science journals and proceedings, not humanities ones. Somehow this was less damning for science, which depends on s rigorous referee procedure, than for humanities papers trying to manage interdisciplinary approaches into fields it was never going to understand.
I'm really not sure about that one. I'd say anyone who is even passably science-literate and not given to perverse conspiracy theories would agree, but I don't know how many of each of those categories there are. I'd say the conspiracy theory crowd are a fairly small minority, but I don't know about the science-literate.
I'd say belief in/awareness of a technology-driven apocalypse is definitely part of the postmodern condition. Right now that's kind of the bookend of the postmodern era: it started with the apocalyptic vision of two world wars, it held its breath through mutually assured destruction, and now it's getting ready for irreversible destructive manmade climate change.
Quoting Tom Storm
A lot of people get retrospectively relabeled as pomo or proto-pomo. It's quite common in criticism of pomo within philosophy to start at Kant. For some reason, Descartes making God an absolute necessity for objective reality was seen as secular Enlightenment, while Kant saying we can't know everything was seen as Bible-thumping. Conservative philosophers are weird.
But I think Wayfarer is right. Even if late modern physics isn't strictly pomo, it would be weird if it wasn't a major contributor.
Quoting Janus
Manmade climate change's reality has an overwhelming consensus in science, so I expect that scientifically literate people would agree that our use of technology is apocalyptic. Those who disagree don't care much for scientific authority, evidence, facts, etc. One grand narrative or another falls either way.
that’s quitter talk
I like to imagine what science and technology, and civilization itself, would have been like absent fossil fuels.I am not one who believes that our salvation lies in scientifically advanced technology. I dislike the whole idea of gratuitous consumerism, but I also recognize that the advances in medicine, prosperity due to scientifically advanced technology made possible by cheap energy (fossil fuels) that we have enjoyed and the rampant consumer economy are all of a piece and codependent; you can't have one without the others. I don't think it would be a tragedy if humanity returns to hunter/ gatherer life.
There is a growing distrust in Western medicine which strikes me as one of the many modes of postmodernism. It seems to me right now that a lot of people are willing to bet their health on it.
Yes, plastics of course and fertilizers that are killing soils world wide are based on fossil fuels as well as many medicines.
Yeah, too strong. Nevertheless, I remember from my poly sci days that some of the "natives" who got restless were not just the indig subjects in the colonies. Sometimes they were home-grown, marginalized (that's why we don't hear much about them) champions of the oppressed. They can be a real thorn in the side of their own government. They did feel disgust with it.
There were:
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
One day in a village somewhere the local judge invited a friend over to one of his hearings. Two people involved in a dispute turned up. One began to relate his side of the story and when he'd finished the judge calmy declared, "you're right!" It was now the second person's turn and he too gave his version of the dispute. When he was done, the judge, again without batting an eyelid, announced, "you're right!" The judge's friend was utterly bewildered by all this and said, "this is utter nonsense! they can't both be right." The judge simply looked at his friend and replied, "you're also right!" :chin: :lol:
So you're sympathetic to postmodernism?
I think like a lot of things it's got some vital stuff and some guff, but the reason I started this thread is because of various conversations I've had with people here that showed me that what I thought was vital/guff was not what they thought was vital/guff.
I think it's difficult to separate postmodernism from its detractors, which have never struck me as thorough. I think it's also difficult to separate descriptions of pomo society from endorsements of it, hence this thread. (I'm very surprised that so many people believe that postmodern era occurred, which is an implicit agreement that some postmodern philosophy was necessary, although not necessarily the one we got.)
Mostly my feeling is that pomo was fundamentally accurate, but no one really knew what to do with it, much like existentialism which I think of as early postmodernism. A lot of it also seems to come down to matters of taste, or rather of distaste of things held beyond criticism being criticised.
In short, there's something there, and it deserves a fairer shake, both by people outside of it and by its researchers (pomo needs a better class of postmodernist).
I'll drink to that! :up:
Back in the day I'd found philosophical p0m0 to be an academically effete redundancy selling the news a day late and dollar short that "metanarratives, epistemes" were suspect because they – their subject Man – had been decentered. Big whup. Modernity organically grows out of the first great (though marginalized) decentering: Copernicus' Heliocentric model of the solar system, followed by (just the highlights):
• Cervantes' & Shakespeare's metafictions
• Galileo's Mediocrity Principle, Relativity & (revived) "atomism"
• Spinoza's Natura Naturans, Conatus, Affects ... & (first of a kind) biblical criticism/deconstruction
• Newton's Gravity constant (death of telelogy)
• Hume's Bundle theory of "the self", Induction problem & Is-Ought "guillotine"
• Darwin-Wallace's speciation (descent) by Natural Selection
• Boltzmann's 3rd law of thermodynamics ("heat death of the universe")
• Schopenhauer-Nietzsche's Will ("unconscious") ... genealogical method, perspectivism, etc
• political-economic anarchism (mutualist, syndicalist, libertarian communist, etc)
• Einstein's Relativity theories
• quantum uncertainty
• Gödel's Incompleteness theorems (+ Turing, Von Neumann, Chaitin, Wolfram)
• Shannon's Information entropy
• Wittgenstein's forms of life-language games-meaning is usage
• fallibilism ... falsificationism ...
• semiotics ... structuralism ...
• Chomsky's Universal Generative Grammar
• absurdism (e.g. Zapffe, Camus)
• economic democracy (stakeholder socioeconomics contra shareholder capitalism)
• Kahneman & Tverksy's cognitive biases & prospect theory
By the early '90s I'd had enough of Francophone obscurant logorrhea (looking at you Derrida et al) & the virulent Heideggerasty running through academe at the time. The worse part, in my mind, is that p0m0 sophists were refuting themselves by radically relativizing all claims including, by implication, their own, thereby disarming any intellectual resistance or operations against their perceived "logocentric" opponents. Useless. In the American context, non-Jamesian/Rortian pragmatisms + left-libertarian critiques of – alternatives to – the neoliberal, military keynesian status quo is still the only "viable" oppositional stance given that 1960s-80s p0m0 was DOA. Pathetic really. So now catastrophic climate change seems the last great "opportunity in disaster" for a transvaluation of all values and withering away of the state, otherwise ... only a Singularity can save us. :sweat:
Ah. I think part of it has to do with one's attitudes towards the Parisians: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard and so on. If this is what is meant by "pomo", then I can see the many disagreements coming in.
If you have in mind Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rorty and then you add in the novelists, then I think it's interesting.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes. But I ask you, what aspect of pomo had not been articulated previously by other people many, many years ago? I mean the sophists were a kind of postmodernism.
The taste factor is crucial, I agree.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I think this is quite sensible. Perhaps David Foster Wallace was the best proponent of pomo, in terms of articulating many of its peculiarly modern concerns, in ordinary language. Not only in fiction, but also in non-fiction and in interviews as well.
Darwin is a good shout, mind, and displays his merits by still being rejected on grounds of incompatibility with that most pernicious of grand narratives, completing Copernicus's good work.
But it's interesting isn't it, that simultaneously Darwin could be a good contender for The Start of it All with his godless universe and Kant is in the running for his godfulness. The problem with pomo is very dependent on what axe needs grinding.
Excellent post. :up:
To me that’s like asking what aspect of a present day mammal’s functioning hadnt been articulated previously by a billion year old simple invertebrate. If one wants to simplify the notion of function to an extreme degree, then one can see them as similar or even identical. But the nature of nature is to overcome itself. Both natural and cultural history is a process of endless transformation of previous structures and functions. . Postmodernism is inextricably bound to an era of the West just as biological
structures that depend on and transform precious ones are marked by their emergence in a particular era.
Who are these non/Jamesian pragmatists? Certainly not Dewey or Mead. Do you mean Peirce?
And where do you stand on critical theorists like Adorno and Habermas, Badiu , Lacan, Zizek or pomo theologians like Caputo , Critchley, Charles Taylor?
And that's a fair analogy. But behind the heavy verbiage, what's new in postmodernism? If you want to say that it arose in combination with a certain type of mode of production, sure, that's fine.
And its good and sometimes useful to see the power dynamics behind prisons and psychiatry or to perhaps look at knowledge as component of markets. That was better stated and established by the development of the PR system in the early 20th century. But still, it was good work.
It's also good to analyze the various aspects of states ideology and it is also useful to point out that aboriginal people's often get left out.
But to claim that science is too "arborescent" and not rhizomatic enough or to say that what's missing from analytic philosophy is that they "do philosophy" as if nothing has happened in 20th century history, as Derrida said, or to say, as Lacan that "Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the square root of -1.", doesn't look to me as any kind of advance at all.
So, yes, I do take issue with the verbiage and the use of legitimate scientific concepts in an illogical manner. At the same time I think some value can be found in most people.
But I don't see what's new about the thought, besides the jargon.
Quoting Manuel. Rorty made this argument also, meaning that most analytic philosophy was simply regurgitating Kant and hadnt absorbed Hegel’s lessons yet.
Quoting Manuel
What’s new is that it rejects representationalism and the neo-Kantian notion of a world out there we can only approach through interpretation. Philosophical postmodernism might become clearer in you in the guise of enactive, embodied cognitivism. Zahavi would also be a good place to start.
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism
Of course not. My point is that p0m0 says nothing new that has not been said clearer, more insightfully and more applicably since the late 16th/early 17th century. That p0m0 is "a waste of time" is a fact of its scholastic-like vacuity and sophistries (no need to name names, is there?)
Quoting Manuel
:up:
To prove your point convincingly you would have to be able to summarize the arguments of Derrida or Foucault.
That comes out of phenomenology, which precedes postmodernism. Merleau Ponty died in 1961, whereas post-modernism came out in the late 60's early 70's.
It also depends on if it is correct to label Heidegger as a postmodernist, which is not clear. But then he would be the very best of pomo, in my opinion.
Zahavi is a Husserlian phenomenologist. I was just reading him the other day.
We’re not talking chronology , but similarity of ideas. There are loads of papers connecting MP to postmodernists like Deleuze and Nancy. In fact, in terms of content, I would argue that Heidegger’s phenomenology ( and Gene Gendlin’s also) comes AFTER postmodernism. In fact , in 1997 Gendlin held a conference at the University of Chicago titled ‘After Postmodernism’. Trust me, what he had in mind had nothing to do with what the critics of pomo on this thread are advocating for.
As I understand it, Being and Time was extremely influential for postmodernism, that came out in 1927. And also for existentialism and phenomenology. Maybe postmodernism would've arose with Husserl alone, I don't know.
Derrida's De la grammatologie came out in 67', Foucault's Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines came out in 66'.
So I'd have to know who you have in mind when you say postmodernism. That's just the thing, is postmodernism over? I have no idea. There's talk of post-postmodernism, I don't know what that means.
Yeah, but there's no "need to prove" my/any "point" when the meanings of all "points" are episteme-relative or deferred. (Anyone who has read Derrida & Foucault against themselves (i.e. in Nietzschean fashion) would "know" that.) :wink:
Adorno, Žižek, Critchley have always been interesting reads ... the others not so much.
Yeah, so what? I'm a big fan of Schopenhauer and yet as anti-idealist (of any flavor) as they come, and Foucault too but I'm also anti-p0m0. Watch that genetic fallacy, Joshs ..
Not quite:
“ For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.
Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”
Derrida, Limited, inc.
Well, to begin with , a good thing to point out would be that there ARE valid and invalid arguments from a pomo perspective, as Derrida just told you. But their validity is relative to the norms of intersubjective communities, which can remain more or less stable for long periods of time. Think of Kuhn’s paradigms. If epistemes has no relative stability there could be no science.
Logocentrism is the belief that objects are present-to-themselves things, locatable as independent of their relation to a subject.
Bear in mind that Indians had been organizing efforts to rid themselves of the British Raj since before WWI. It was an item on their agenda about which both Moslems and Hindus agreed. At the end of WWII Britain was bankrupt; some food rationing continued for 9 years after the end of the war. They were in no position to enforce the terms of empire, especially a global empire of increasingly restive independence movements.
No doubt, though, there were people in GB who thought GB should get out of the empire business, for reasons military, economic or moral.
I only use the term postmodern in reference to a core group of French philosophers (Derrida, Focault , Deleuze, Nancy, Lyotard) and those they influenced or who offer similar ideas.
Most of the world hasnt yet caught up to these writers, in my opinion. I know of only a tiny handful of thinkers who have gone beyond them. Gendlin is one of them.
“An enormous gap called postmodernism has recently been created between experiencing and concepts. I want not only to examine the nature of this gap, but also to attempt to move beyond it. Of course there are many strands of postmodernism. It is best known for denying that there is any truth, or that one can claim to ground any statement in experience. Postmodernism is right in that one can not claim to represent or copy experiencing. But this does not mean that what we say has no relationship to what we experience—that there is no truth, that everything we say is arbitrary. In contrast to postmodernism, I show that we can have direct access to experiencing through our bodies (Gendlin 1992). I maintain that bodily experience can not he reduced to language and culture. Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always
exceeds culture, history, and language.”
“ The Postmodernists were wrong to deny the objectivity of scientific concepts (especially when they wrote the
denial on computers, and took airplanes to conventions to say it). Their real contribution was destroying the representational assumption. But since they saw no alternative, they glorified ‘limbo’. We see exactly how logic builds the world further, and how logical consequences add to implicit understanding. We see why our two systems must be kept apart, and also how
they relate.” Gene Gendlin
I think since pomo started out as a sort of global state of the infoNation, it's less a question of precursors and more a question of contemporaneous relevance. As 180 pointed out, there were lots of precursors, but clearly Darwin wasn't talking about advertising and computing, nor was Copernicus, nor Wittgenstein, not Einstein. Nor does a philosophical precursor translate automatically into a worldwide change of view: philosophy is largely constrained to academia, even more so than science. Postmodernism started as a report on the postwar West. It was empirical first of all, not theoretical.
This is sort of jumping the gun a bit, but if we accept that the postmodern era happened at all, then we're accepting an event prior to which there was a general belief in special neutral, objective frames of reference from which you can judge the truth of certain statements and after which there was a general belief that no such frame exists (scepticism about authority): everything that uses language does so within a language game, with its own assumptions, biases, hidden dichotomies and preferences, axioms, contradictions, etc. There's a nice analogy with quantum mechanics here: observing an experiment makes you part of the apparatus... You can't not play the game.
In this regard it seems to me that something like deconstruction is warranted. The lack of a neutral perspective justifies a wariness about accepting the perspective of the author without examination. Otherwise we can take the position that, while metanarratives fell out of favour, they're not necessarily wrong, that there's an optimum set of metanarratives that are objectively true. Which is what the next thread was going to be about
Quoting James Riley
Yes, this is why I stated the OP as I did. Postmodernism started out pretty much as a description, even a criticism, of trends. Some postmodernists are not in favour of postmodernism, they're just also not in favour of sticking their heads in the sands. Others do embrace it, some ironically, some not. Some flit between opposing it with respect to their metanarratives and endorsing it with respect to other, less-favoured metanarratives, a position that's pretty easy to deconstruct which we might consider the start of post-truth.
Quoting 180 Proof
Which late 16th/early 17th century texts were concerned with advertising and computers?
Nice quote. I've read Derrida reject the accusation that deconstruction levels the playing field, an accusation I've never understood. Just because you can deconstruct any text, it doesn't follow that all texts are shown to be equally incoherent or unstable. No deconstructionist is going to hear a Trump speech and read a Nature article and conclude that they're much of a muchness.
I'm not wanting to pooh pooh pomo (poohmo?) criticism; I would like to hear more, but there are strong whiffs of substitution, straw men, and other fallacies in almost all critiques I've heard. Chomsky's criticism is pretty well known and well-quoted, and it's... huh?!? When something makes very clever people say very stupid things, it's worth checking out.
This must be to 180 Proof since I have not raised theory. Any female pomo theorists other than Kristeva?
Joshs, what I am really interested in is do you have a view on Wayfarer's tentative historical timeline QM to postmodern thinking?
Yeah and we shot a lot of them.
I see.
Well, it's a question of dispute to claim that the postmodernists achieved something of which few people have caught up on. I think Susan Haack, Galen Strawson and Raymond Tallis do very, very good work and none of them agree with Kant on much.
Not that agreeing or disagreeing with Kant by itself is worthy of praise or derision. Just more evidence of how influential Kant was, for good or ill.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Maybe you're right. I doubt that anyone coming out of the postwar West would have used that term or even agreed with what it came to mean. If the question is that of information and control of people, the PR industry, was ahead of all of them, clearly. They actually impacted the world to a degree which is hard to conceptualize.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You'd have to give one or two examples, otherwise I'm not sure I follow.
Russell was aware about points of view and frames of reference, he went to jail for resisting WWI, one of the very few to do so. When asked later in life why he never commented on the crimes of Communists, he replied by saying "there was no need." That's all the media talked about.
So it's not as if pomo came and suddenly people became aware of different perspectives.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sure. I mean that's a sane attitude.
Maybe now I'm the one being confused but the birth of modern philosophy was with Descartes, who said that it was a good idea to, at least once, doubt everything.
I think that's a fine attitude to have in general, when warranted, of course.
Judith Butler comes to mind , also Hanne De Jaegher, but there are many more.
Quoting Tom Storm
My comments only apply to the range of thinking that I believe is common to the French philosophers who emerged in the 1960’s (although I do see the ideas of Nietzsche , Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as also post-modern). Their thinking is also referred to as post-structuralist , since they specifically targeted and used as their source of contrast the fad of structuralism which was popular in political theory, anthropology , psychology, literary theory , philosophy and linguistics in the 1950’s ( Althusser, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, etc).
As far as relativity and quantum theory is concerned, in my opinion these approaches in physics belong to Kantian and neo-Kantian idealism, which may very well be considered by certain historians and others within the humanities as postmodern based on how they are defining the term. But if one wants to define it strictly in relation to the thinking of the philosophers I mentioned above, then it belongs to an earlier era of philosophy and falls under their critique.
I agree they do good work and I think the difference between them and the postmodernists is slight but still important.
You can add John Searle and Steven Pinker to that list.
But it's not like the idea is that WWII happened, the postmodernists said "We're pomo now," and people started acting all pomo. The fallout of WWII, including in commerce, was an input to pomo theory, not an output.
Quoting Manuel
Again this seems back to front. Early pomo writers like Lyotard and Baudrillard weren't spawning different perspectives: they were writing about things that had already happened... Fall of metanarratives, symbols without symboliseds, etc. These were already real before the postmodernists got involved. Or at least that's the question raised in the OP.
Quoting Manuel
Except God. And the limitless capability of the rational mind. Perhaps he did doubt these once each, in a perfunctory manner.
Exactly.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sure, we pick out those things we can still find useful today.
So use radical doubt and see what reason tells you. We know reason is not all encompassing, but if we use it judiciously, we might be able to make sense of the world.
We don't need God anymore - or at least, many of us no longer see it as necessary.
As an aside, not referring to you, but it bothers me that Descartes gets so much crap these days. It's not as if a scientist born in Descartes time would've obviously come up with general relativity, or would've obviously had seen how thought and matter cannot be metaphysically distinct.
I think Descartes is exactly on point highlighting our reason, it's an honorable aspect of being human. It's just that it's not all encompassing, as you rightly say.
Silly. That's like asking which sacred scriptures were concerned with abortion or secularism?
Quoting Manuel
:up:
Taken in this way and as a set of feature relating to the sensibilities with which we apprehend the world, I'd say it's hard to deny that postmodernity - at least taken as a tendency or set of tendencies - has definitely had its time. The issue of the 'waning of affect' is one of the more questionable theses, and it's arguable that there's been a heightening of affective importance in recent times, but otherwise the rest of the list is pretty on point I'd say. On the other hand, there is the consideration of just how euro or Anglo-centric the notion is. Like, how much of this characterizes the sensibility present in Asia, Africa, or South America for instance? Is postmodernity a phenomenon more specific to the global north? I suspect so.
That all said, of all the features involved, my own winner for the most significant one is the waning of historicity. This goes hand in hand with the basic neoliberal premise that 'there is no alternative' (TINA) and the notion of "capitalist realism" - that there is no real future. That's been disrupted somewhat by the slow rot of the American empire and the rise of a new bi or tri polarity on the global scale (China-US-Russia), but even then you get this feeling that at stake is the rise of a new hegemon which only a few tweaks here and there (slightly less liberal, still capitalist as all hell). That we seem to be unable to locate ourselves in time (and space too!), is a big one. Jameson calls it an inability to engage in 'cognitive mapping'. More and more I find Benjamin's reflection on history to be more pertinent than ever:
"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (Thesis IX, Theses on the Philosophy of History).
No, I wouldn't criticise him for dualism. I think his meditations were absolute tosh even at the time, though.
Quoting 180 Proof
It would be if you were saying that a philosophy concerning abortion was already covered by the Bible. And it would be an equally apt question :)
“....But, as in the " Discourse on Method," I had requested all who might find aught meriting censure in my writings, to do me the favor of pointing it out to me, I may state that no objections worthy of remark have been alleged against what I then said on these questions....”
(M.F.P., Preface to the Reader, 1647, in Veitch 1901)
Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, et al aside.....asked and answered in exchanges of letters through Mersenne, even before publication of Meditations
————-
Thought maybe....you know, in your spare time.....you might find something interesting here, essay by Williams specifically:
http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/59207/frontmatter/9781107059207_frontmatter.pdf
I don’t do postmodernism, so beg pardon for being off-topic.
I think, as 180 showed, you could argue for centuries back to decentralising, relativistic, or sceptical precursors, proto-pomo-contenders, and things that started it all. The interwar period seems as good as postwar to me. The Third Policeman was written then iirc.
Sure. I mean, it's fine if you want to focus on the skeptical side, or on the problem of "metanarratives", that can be useful.
However, I would think that someone like you would be concerned when serious physicists like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont show how many of the figures belonging in this school of thought, make science a total metaphor, making meaningless statements about how math and physics relate to politics or power.
And I personally think that science has several important limits when it comes to what it can hope to explain.
The Sokal affair seemed to me pretty stupid on both sides. Sokal got his paper rejected from several journals before finding one stupid enough to publish it. I don't think it says much of anything at all other than Sokal was an arsehole with a conservative axe to grind and Social Text had trouble unpacking his paper and ill-advisedly published it anyway.
If we are to make the claim that the worst is a synecdoche of the whole, science fares no better than postmodernism, since they returned the favour with a slew of nonsense papers that got published in peer-reviewed science journals. The auto-generated paper fiasco more recently also demonstrates that there are plenty of science journals out there that aren't as exacting as we pride ourselves on or, worse, willing to lower scientific standards in exchange for cash (viz. every pay-to-publish journal, looking at you Elsevier!). Which fits exceedingly well into the postmodern critique of science. Who's the idiots here?
It's just not an argument imo, and yet it's usually the first thing that comes up. (Kudos to us it took three pages.)
I had in mind Sokal and Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense, which presents a good argument on "pomo science". As for the Sokal affair in general, yeah, I agree it shows many problems in academia/publishing.
What gets me in the willful obscurantism. If they have something to say, say it clearly. Foucault could be quite clear when he wanted to. To say that there are many different perspectives and that one should be critical of what scientists say, is not particularly hard to state or understand, I don't think.
This critique could be made of many: Kant, Husserl and even Aristotle can be very obscure. There's a difference between not being able to write clearly vs. making something hard on purpose. I think Parisian pomo's - with some exceptions - do the latter. It can mislead people into thinking they're being deep. Adding bad science to it makes it worse.
But if you stick to people like Rorty, Wallace and the like, then I perceive something more coherent.
I would like to note that, for better or worse, postmodernism never got in France the echo it got in the US, where it became dominant in humanities. See the excellent [i]French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, by François Cusset.
[/i]
Agreed, and he lambasted Derrida's 'obscurantist terrorism', as reported by Searle.
Anyways, I got some books by Delueze, Derrida and Foucault, and will be reading them. So it will be happening in my reading room for sure.
This is true. It's still popular in the US. France has moved on, I think.
That’s because Foucault couldn’t understand the ideas, and Searle was and is hopelessly behind when it comes to any of the postmodernism, including Foucault.
Yes. Even Foucault is pretty much buried nowadays, nobody studies him much in France, although he was clearly not a charlatan. Deleuze is an exception in that he is still considered 'current', I believe for good reasons. Badiou is also still around, but I don't know much about him. Seems to me that he is better known in the US, like Derrida.
That's the main problem I personally see with some pomo texts and authors, which tend to think 'en roue libre' (free wheeling) i.e. without subjecting their thought to empirical refutation or critical analysis. Too facile.
Badiou's popularity in the US is due, in large part, to Žižek no doubt. I think Žižek is quite entertaining and I'd put him apart from the usual crowd, even if he discusses many of the pomos.
Foucault was probably the best of the Parisians, whatever else one may think about how far one should take his analysis. Deleuze, at least for me, is an edge case. I think his vocabulary was on the whole, innovative and his emphasis on difference, strange, but not bad. The problem is that as far as I know, I don't know Deluzians who have actually tried to defend Deleuze in Fashionable Nonsense.
I think those accusations merit serious discussion. And Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is obscure in the extreme. I tried like a few different "intro books' to Deleuze, and I don't think I've ever read worse "introductions to" on anybody.
I know some may like Derrida, I do not. Nor Lacan, who is problematic for many reasons. For these two, I really think they tried to be as obscure as possible.
As for the rest Lyotard, Baudrillard, Guatarri, De Man, Althusser and the rest, I can't say much, other than they share a style and prose which has not been good for literature, imho.
Note that Badiou was also the target of an academic hoax à la Sokal. On April fool's day, 2016, two French philosophers, Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse, announced that they were the authors of an article titled "Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non)Being-Queer", published in the peer-reviewed Badiou Studies (sic) and signed by an imaginary Benedetta Tripodi. The article was just a bunch of BS couched in Badiousan language.
Umberto Eco? I love him but never saw him as Pomo... ?
Personally I agree with the (or one of the) basic diagnostic of postmodernism, in summary that science as a form of social activity is liable to echo chambers and cultural biases. This realisation -- in my opinion -- was true, but became perverted and excessive. I also believe that it gave a 'script' to powerful economic lobbies trying to pervert scientific knowledge in their favour: the tobacco industry, and more recently the oil industry managed to engineer doubt, by funding specific scientists who doubted (or said they doubted) the scientific consensus on tobacco causing cancer, or climate change respectively. I don't think such manipulation of scientific discourse was happening before Pomo. Maybe I'm wrong, but the idea is that the current post-truth moment is a child of Pomo.
True, but not a pomo-specific thing. I think more a French and German thing, right? (I'm thinking of the French and German existentialists in particular.) Lyotard, of what I've read, isn't particularly difficult in the scheme of things.
Quoting Olivier5
Yeah I see him as a structuralist philosopher but a postmodernist author. But then arguably structuralism is also postmodern, at least insofar as it attacks meaning in written language, which is the language of philosophy, science, etc.
It's mostly direct quotes from many Postmodernists in which they use well defined scientific terms and use in to speak of power, or politics, in short making connections that don't exist. But it was illuminating to me.
I'm no scientistic person by any means, but if I were to start saying something like masculine power can be seen to be manifested in general relativity, I would be ridiculed, rightly so.
I've seen cases in which people start saying stuff which is not too far from Deepak Chopra, though they seem to think they're being serious.
I did not know that Badiou was subject to a hoax. I'm not against hoaxes per se, but at this point as @Kenosha Kid has pointed out, they can be abused. The point is well established by now.
I think Ecco, Pynchon and Wallace should be included within pomo. It actually makes the case for it as movement have much more substance, in my opinion.
Semipomo.
Pomo is seen in France as a post-structuralist movement, more dynamic in its thinking, more historical, seeing structures as fluid and evolutive rather than carved in epistemic marble.
You're right. Actually, I've read that much of this goes straight back to Kant. He was very, very obscure but quite substantive. Then look at German Idealism, all of it, minus Schopenhauer, was extremely dense. France used to be different, they strove for clarity as seen in Descartes, Diderot and so on.
Something happened post WWII were they became obscure suddenly. I think this is improving now. Lyotard is ok, not particularly hard, but I think you can notice him forming certain sentence structures which appear (to me anyway) to want to impose insight on you. He goes on to say that science is "imperialistic".
Sure, scientists have done quite horrible things. Science itself, or philosophy or any other subject itself is perfectly fine, most of the time.
There are still very clear French writers. Camus' style was more than clear: elegant but direct, and even sometimes blunt in making the case. I find Edgar Morin perfectly clear. Barthes is ok, Beauvoir was limpid.
Rest assured that not every French philosopher tries to impress his or her audience with jargon, and I'm pretty sure there exist arcane charlatans in English-language philosophy too.
Yes. Camus was excellent, Sartre too in his novels. I should've said, by the late 60's something happened that made many of the French intellectuals write poorly.
But, point well made.
I blame Althusser for this.
It's a key cultural question whether this is right or not. I am not sure myself. I suspect that post-truth was the inevitable trajectory of corporate power. As we know some of the academics hired to say that smoking did not cause lung cancer (Dr Fred Singer, etc) later started to work in the climate change denial business. Being able to denigrate facts or notions of truth is really important to some corporations. Everyone learned a great deal from the pioneering denialism and alternative facts of Big Tobacco.
He's a borderline case in my book – post-structuralist, aesthetician, mixed-genres novelist, cultural critic – a medievalist who reads a lot of medievalism in 'modernity', and not anti-modern at all, just interpreting 'the modern' as a (subliminal/semiotic) medieval masquerade. Joyce & Borges, I believe, are Eco's literary influences too.
Searle may have admired Foucault but he utterly rejected the common themes of postmodern thought. I am saying that Foucault didnt understand Derrida based on
my own reading of both Foucault and Derrida. I have never found Derrida to be obscure or trying to avoid critique. I agree with Derrida’s critique of Foucault, such as his tendency toward historicism, turning history into a pre-determining scheme. I’m not sure what empirical refutation has to do with postmodern philosophy , other than the fact that postmodernism as well as phenomenology digs beneath the presuppositions of empiricism in order to expose its limits.
This just smacks of anti-intellectualism. If you can’t understand the French writers, then so be it. But don’t blame them for your difficulties. I admit there are some French philosophers whose style so do find obscure , such as Badiu and Lacan. But not Derrida or Deleuze. They were trying to convey new and difficult concepts, so the appearance of obscurity goes along with the territory.
You may be right. I guess my take on this kind of critique would be that getting a coherent or appropriate reading on much of the work by these theorists is so often contentious even amongst gifted academics, so why bother? If some of our great minds, who are sympathetic to the French writers, don't get it right, what chance for the rest of us? You can see how people come to a view that this is an exclusive cultural activity for those in academe whose business it often is to pars the ostensibly inscrutable and talk to each other about it.
:ok:
Quoting Joshs
I'm not sure about that. I had a pomo phase, which is why I can talk about this a bit. I read both primary and secondary literature on many of these guys.
By far the one who had the most useful literature was Lacan, despite his conscious decision to be obscure. Bruce Fink, Phillip Hill and others were quite good. I of course never saw in Lacan what they said about him, but the stuff they put out in the intros, was quite good.
I put most effort in trying to understand Deleuze. The book by Claire Colebrook was inscrutable, all it did wad repeat the word "difference" many times over. Other books, like his alphabet, just repeated the words with no insight. Eventually I just read many parts of A Thousand Plateaus, I got some fancy vocab and a vague idea, but not the rewards one would expect given the effort put in.
On the other hand Manuel DeLanda's Delueze-based work was quite good. As are the novels of Michael Cisco, who explicitly thanks Deleuze. Cisco is a genius.
When I've done similar things with Aristotle, Kant, Husserl and Whitehead the effort more than paid off, you could just see it.
I felt like Derrida was mocking me. And his followers weren't much better.
I'm maybe missing some IQ points, it's very possible. But given my experience with other figures, I don't think it's me, cause' I really tried to understand.
Yeah. I mean, it kind of makes me feel a bit for those parts of it that are good like Foucault, Ecco, Pynchon, Zizek, etc.
But, many people think differently, I guess.
Introductions to Deleuze are a mixed bag, although they've tended to get better over time, as the community has had more time to digest what is going on. My favorite is Levi Bryant's Difference and Givenness, but if you want something free, and also a pleasure to read, check out Jon Roffe's The Works of Gilles Deleuze, Vol. 1. Otherwise Daniel Smith's Essays on Dleueze is also unsurpassed. Colebrook... is not good as an intro.
Ah. Thanks, I'll be sure to take a look at them. :up:
And I found that one you mention for free, actually:
https://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/?get_group_doc=36%2F1362087066-BryantDifferenceandGivenness.pdf&fbclid=IwAR0yCvNGPKKzKcfP8jOsZ0vB0BxLukHmplfK3q21wTt45w8mJSnTdxHULHM
No one should worry about getting a philosopher right. A great philosopher is able to reach a wide variety of readers on many different levels. One’s goal should be to learn from a philosopher something that shows the world in a new light.
If you were to ask me what Derrida books to read to get the most consistent and clear sense of what he is trying to tell us , I would immediately answer , skip the formal works and go for the interviews( Points, Positions , Limited, Inc, Arguing with Derrida) . Here he was forced to do what he hated most, to summarize in a succinct sentence or two his major themes. With Deleuze I’d be hard pressed to come up with anything similar. I’d be inclined to suggest the early books without Guattari (there’s no way two abstract thinkers were on exactly the same page in their thinking. I’m convinced their collaborations are deliberately designed to give us a collage of two minds that frequently strains against itself).
That's the way it should be with any author. Just like you did, offer some way into someone's thought and proceed.
But I have to say, I'm just not inclined to like Derrida. I don't like his followers, I've read a few of his essays and I didn't think them to be particularly interesting. Just like some people dislike or don't think much of Hegel, Heidegger or anyone else.
It's just not the type of philosophy I'm attracted to. But thanks for the pointers.
There's different levels and then there's wrong? No? If we say Derrida says nothing is true and nothing matters, do we not challenge and to some extent scorn that reading?
Or do you think the point is found in having the contretemps?
Quoting Joshs
That was certainly my experience. It was kind of a relief actually.
I never read Derrida so I cannot really comment. Just wanted to point out that Pomo should not be taken a coherent doctrine or school of thought, as evidenced by this opposition between him and Foucault.
Would you have an example of a specific point that Derrida made and Foucault misunderstood?
Also, would you mind pointing me to a Derrida text that you find clear and insightful?
He says similar of all grand narratives, that they're "terrorising" and "totalitarian", "silencing" other discourses.
My view on this, and Lyotard did later recant some of the stuff on science, is that his error was mistaking the scientific method for a narrative when it's an algorithm. The real narrative in question is a narrative _about_ the scientific method which was a fertile area of study (Kuhn before, Latour after).
My personal belief is that we should take a bit more care not to deceive others and ourselves when it comes to communicating science to the outside world. Scientists tend to confuse models with reality, which amounts to perpetuating the myth that science is basically divine revelation, some set of incantations that opens a portal through the walls of our subjectivity that gives us direct access to nude reality itself. We're smart people, we don't believe this, but others do.
Feynman was a great layperson's pedagogue: no bullshit in his books. He's a good model for how other scientists should talk about their work and science in general.
Would you say that, at the time, masculine bias was manifest in medicinal science?
:clap: :100:
I've recently rewatched Inland Empire for the first time since it came out and was inspired to write a draft thread about it. Lynch is amazing!
Quoting Tom Storm
Does Derrida say nothing is true? There is a difference between something being true and us knowing it or, if we know it, knowing that it's true. Let's say some philosophical theory happens to be true... How would we know? As per Wittgenstein, the theory cannot legitimise itself, nor can a theory outside of that theory legitimise it.
For example, we believe (rightly imo) that a scientific theory is legitimised by empiricism, but what legitimises empiricism? Somewhere along the line, you hit an overt or covert preference for one thing over another and find that, if you prefer the other instead, you get a different narrative. This doesn't mean that the other is better or that the first is necessarily untrue. If you compare a scientific review of climate change to a Trump rant about climate change, one does come off better than the other. But you can't elevate the former to the status of truth that way either, otherwise you're doing this:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Every theory basks in the glow of truth only until it's successor arrives.
Do you have evidence of that?
Sokal is a leftist, and he's not an arsehole.
Such hoaxes are useful, if only to put reviewers and publishers on notice that they'd better work diligently.
A list of academic hoaxes:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings
I agree but I was just quoting what some might say about Derrida. I personally have no position on Derrida.
Epistemology is tricky. This would matter more to you than to me since I am not a scientist or a theorist. I really don't need much more than experience or judgement to get by in my world. You need a lot more. I'm also not in the search for truth business either; what brought me here is to understand what others think and why. It's been very interesting.
I take it for granted that we all hold presuppositions that undergird our belief systems and personal epistemes. Justifying these presuppositions is tricky and in some cases impossible. If God had meant us to apply philosophy to all things he would have made us clever.
I can agree with that: it's like a security or penetration test, it's better to not have the shortcomings but second best is to at least be aware of them.
However:
a) This is not what Sokal was doing. He wasn't providing a useful service to Social Text or academic publication in general. His hoax was a bludgeon to attack a very particular kind of target, one that he felt threatened the status of science. In that regard, yes, he was an arsehole with a conservative axe to grind.
b) We can't be hypocrites about this. We can't support Sokal's effort to discredit a particular journal on the one hand and then, when the same happens to science journals, go 'Well that just shows how useful hoaxes are' and let science off the hook. What's bad for the goose is bad for the gander.
Quoting Olivier5
I think I misremembered, apologies. It was Social Text that rejected the paper several times, not different journals. They didn't think it was philosophically very strong.
P S. I feel that, because the Sokal affair inevitably comes up, too much time is probably spent by me defending postmodernism from hypocritical ad hominem, when I have much stronger allegiances to science than to postmodernism. Truth is, there are also bad anti-scientific postmodernists and protopomos, such as Feyerabend and his ilk. Bruno Latour ended up pointing some really useful things out, things that are taught at least in my old physics department, but he mostly talked crap and was a hypocrite.
I think a lot of dubious people of little worth flocked to postmodernism, but I guess that's what postmodernism is about: if you want diverse discourse, you're going to get dipshits. Question is whether the freedom to be utterly wrong is a reasonable price to avoid things like medicine for women falling well behind that for men, or getting stuck in an orthodox rut.
In another, less popular recent thread of mine, I suggested that memetic inbreeding -- echo chambers -- are actually a really good way of rapidly generating new thought, so long as the emerging ideas are allowed to grow up and defend themselves in the big wide world.
After the Sokal affair, Sokal himself was a regular contributor to efforts to bring humanities and science together. Latour changed his position on science and latterly dedicated himself to awareness-raising. By the above criteria, I'd say we came out okay.
Literally the only thing worth mentioning about the whole "affair", before moving on to discuss literally anything else. Or to quote Adam Kotsko:
"It was a total set-up — he proved what he wanted to prove because he totally set up the conditions so that only one answer was possible. A charitable reading of the situation from the journal’s perspective is that they ran the article because they were hungry for dialogue with scientists and were thrilled that Sokal was engaging in it. He lied to them, abused their trust, and then publicly mocked them — and somehow he’s a hero. It’s utter idiocy. And the fact of having been misused in a purposefully nonsensical article has no possible bearing on the value of the “postmodern theory” he pastiched."
Still, the question remains: what passes for nonsense and what doesn't, in a Pomo frame?
Well put. Sagan was also quite good. Dawkins, on the other hand, goes a bit overboard when he speaks of science.
Absolutely. There's no problem at all with saying this. But it's easy to state, one doesn't need to say strange things to get the point across.
Are you asking my opinion or the criteria of journals? Because as I said there's no reason I'd have in-depth knowledge of the latter.
Can a distinction be made between nonsense and sense in a postmodernist framework? Because it's not clear to me that there can be such a thing.
I want to point out that philosophical work is both utterly particular , in its style and language , and an exemplar of a broader approach to thinking. I see Derrida’s thought as closely ties to Heidegger. If you enjoy Heidegger I’d say you are already in touch with much that is central to Derrida. I could widen that scope a bit to include current thinkers associated with the cognitive sciences who have attempted to naturalize Heidegger and Husserl( Gallagher, Varela, Thompson, Fuchs, Slaby, Ratcliffe). If you like their work, you have moved some distance towards Derrida.
I used to like Heidegger more than I do so now, though I still find parts of him interesting.
Husserl I like a bit more, though I personally am learning from Dan Zahavi how to approach him. If you have more suggestions for Husserl, I'll happily look. But not Derrida.
I'm not a believer in the whole "naturalization" business, I think it can be misleading. I tend to follow the rationalist/innatist/nativist camp of Chomsky and McGinn.
Sorry to trot this out again if you’ve already read it, but I think it demonstrates the difficulty of attempting to distill deconstruction down to ‘ nothing is true’. it neither can we err in the opposite direction and interpret the comments below to mean that truth transcends local normative contexts.
“ For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.
Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”
Derrida, Limited, inc.
This seems to have always been p0m0's raison d'etre to occult, or obfuscate (i.e. "defer"), any distinctions, most explicitly between nonsense and sense. Distinctions as such are imposed, so the meta-subtext goes, by the self-serving biases (bigotry, domination) of 'the author' – system-imbedded 'subject' (regime) – and therefore can be 'deconstructed' (subverted? transgressed?) ... with Dada-like, obscurant gibberish?! :sweat:
Quoting Olivier5
I can’t speak to pomo culture, but pomo philosophy, or more specifically poststructuralist philosophy is a range of ideas united by a common overarching set of themes. You make it sound as though Derrida and Foucault’s ideas are utterly incompatible, which just isnt the case. Derrida often pointed out commalities between his work and those he deconstructed. For instance, in this comment Derrida both knowledges a shared focus on force in general and and a specific difference in articulation this concept.
2. The words "force" and "power" also pose, as you can well imagine, enormous problems. I never resort to these words without a sense of uneasiness, even if I believe myself obligated to use them in order to designate something irreducible. What worries me is that in them which resembles an obscure substance that could, in a discourse, give rise to a zone of obscurantism and of dogmatism. Even if, as Foucault seems to suggest, one no longer speaks of Power with a capital P, but of a scattered multiplicity of micropowers, the question remains of knowing what the unity of signification is that
still permits us to call these decentralized and heterogeneous microphenomena
"powers. " For my part, without being able to go much further here, I do not believe that one should agree to speak of "force" or of "power" except under
three conditions, at least.”
Quoting Olivier5
Here’s what I suggested to Manuel:
If you were to ask me what Derrida books to read to get the most consistent and clear sense of what he is trying to tell us , I would immediately answer , skip the formal works and go for the interviews( Points, Positions , Limited, Inc, Arguing with Derrida) . Here he was forced to do what he hated most, to summarize in a succinct sentence or two his major themes.
:100:
That's been exactly my experience too. Again, exceptions, Foucault and the edge case of Deleuze.
The novelists, on the other hand, I think were (and are) quite good. That's a matter of taste.
Quoting Olivier5
Then yes, in my opinion. I haven't read much in the way of pomo journals, and probably a weirdly high proportion of that is social psychology which really is rubbish (but click-bait in a Guardian sort of way). Other than that, the odd article about science (natch) and literature or cinema. Nothing too pseuds-corner compared to your common or garden English literature thesis. (For some reason, I had a string of English lit student girlfriends and always ended up reading their theses.)
That doesn't seem accurate. Deconstruction (if we're counting post-structuralism) is to a large degree about discovering distinctions that the author has obfuscated.
Okay, so how would you make this distinction between sensical Pomo and nonsensical one? What criteria would you use?
[I]Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.[/i]
(What is well conceived is expressed clearly
And the words to say it should come easily)
The verses above have been drilled in every French pupil ever since Boileau, for good reasons. If you can't express yourself clearly and succinctly, you don't really know what you're talking about.
Another criteria I use is whether the text is logically coherent, internally, and logically argued. Likewise the logical consequences of the thesis are important to consider.
Originality of thought is another key criteria for me. I hate to spend time reading banal yada yada. And what's the point of writing things everybody already knows about?
Yet another is appropriate referencing of authors who influenced one's work. It's fine to climb on the shoulders of giants but do quote the giants once in a while.
Last but not least, whether the text resonates with my own experience or bring verifiable evidence is key. Empirical evidence does apply to a lot of what philosophers talk about, metaphysics aside.
The same criteria as any other publication: internal consistency, language that is parsable and referable if not plain, and has some relevance to a broader context. This isn't a pomo distinction, it's just the distinction between sense and nonsense.
Specifically in the part I quoted you were referring to an obfuscation of distinctions. And I'm arguing that clarifying others' distinctions is part of the pomo toolkit. Whether something makes sense to you or not is not something I'd weigh in on.
Even shit pomo (like the aforementioned social psychology) is perfectly intelligible. That's how you know how shit it really is.
Only that similar equivalent "Sokal hoaxes" have gone through very well, which just shows how adrift the whole field is. And it's telling that you describe Sokal to be a conservative, which he isn't. As typical, anybody criticizing postmodernism has to be from the right.
Quoting Maw
Now that's a great metaphor for post-modernism or simply an example of a postmodern film. It Has enough cues and enough of traditional story telling that you try to find a logical string that will make sense of the story. Yet then look at Inland Empire from the same director and yeah, then it's just "postmodernism".
No, I'm not talking about his politics, I'm talking about his position on science. Sokal and many like him considered criticism of science practice as an attack designed to undermine the rightness and truth of scientific realism. In reality, science only really gets stronger through criticism.
(Still Sokal was a leftist, similar to actually others that are politically on the left and worried about postmodernism.)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
How does it get stronger, if you don't believe in the goal of objectivity in science, but start from the idea that it's just a subjective power play?
It should be mentioned that Sokal’s brand of leftism identifies itself with classical Marxism, which is a central object of critique by French postmodernists. So we are talking about two distinctly different ideologies of leftism, as different as classical liberalism ( now dubbed economic conservatism ) and social democratic liberalism.
Again, no. Conservative meaning he feels he needs to defend those ideas from other ideas that might undermine them. I get that this wasn't the answer you wanted, but you don't need to rewrite my arguments for me.
Quoting ssu
I'm not sure that question makes sense. How science gets stronger has nothing to do with what a non-scientist believes, at least not in this instance. As mentioned above, Latour was very anti-science and saw (wrongly) an opportunity to make religion's candle glow comparatively by dimming science's. His criticism, however motivated, whatever his beliefs, was valid when it was valid and invalid when it was not. Invalid criticism isn't something to fear: it can be met quite simply to the scientist's satisfaction, if not the critic's. Valid criticism needs to be taken on board, and it was, to science's betterment hopefully.
?
That's not the most explanatory or easiest to understand answers that I've had read, Kenosha Kid.
Yet isn't the problem when those that should use the scientific method reject it as being part of the modernist agenda? You assume it doesn't matter if this is invalid criticism. Who do you think decides what just is valid or invalid criticism? Or you think that the correct answer will just prevail somehow?
When religion trumps science, science doesn't get stronger, it simply loses. A great example in history is what happened to science in Islam after "the Golden Age" in medieval times. People are people, even scientists. If they are accused of being heretics and will be punished for that, they will shut up and tinker at the sidelines something that is politically correct.
There's something that's not clear to me, which may be relevant for the thread.
What specifically is there in pomo that is of use to thinking about science that stands out as opposed to say, Humean skepticism or some other variety of common sense?
Quoting ssu
I assume this is meant as ironic?
I mean, it's easy to sound "leftier" than anybody if no one understand what you're saying...
Have you read German philosophical texts from the 19th Century? Many of them were quite conservative/right wing and still extremely difficult to understand. So being difficult to understand isn't something that post-modernists have invented.
Basically what I meant was that when conservatives, like let's say Jordan Peterson, criticize postmodernism, it's easy then for many to simply assume that all those who criticize postmodernism have to share the values/arguments/political opinions of Peterson. Sokal as mentioned by is a Marxist, hence the lines for or against post-modernism don't go along the typical culture war lines people assume. And basically should not go.
Yes, that's correct. The German Idealists got lots of prestige in university positions and were lauded by many. Schopenhauer speculated that part of the reason they glorified the state was due to the positions they had in universities, of course, this criticism most heavily levied at Hegel.
It is legitimate to say that Schopenhauer said this out of jealousy, there may be some truth to this, but I just think he really disliked obscurity, making a notable exception for Kant.
Ah, I see, you're going down the Peterson line. Ugh, he's so mediocre and his understanding of most things he talks with confidence about is so low, it's a bit surprising he's so popular. He just calls "Postmodern Marxist" to anybody he disagrees with, usually mentioning no one who fits that category, as you point out.
I was thinking about Chomsky specifically, whose met with Kristeva, Lacan and Foucault.
In either case, I think it's fair to call most of them leftist. How far left is an open question. But Lacan's leftism I suspect is a ruse.
Did not know that about @Joshs, but was aware that Derrida wrote a book on Marx.
When reading so-called "obscure" writers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, and so on, I don't think the point is "getting it right", but rather gleaning insight and novel perspectives. If you don't get the latter from reading an author then you will probably not find much motivation to continue reading them.
Quoting Manuel
I haven't found Kant obscure. For me his work is complex rather than obscure.
I mean, it can be both. I think certain passages in Kant can be called obscure, by this simply meaning hard to understand, not occult or him trying to be hard for the sake of it.
But a lot of his distinctions can be called sophisticated too.
Peirce, for instance, can be obscure in some areas and quite clear in others. Being obscure in itself is not bad, what matters is if there's content behind the phrases. Whitehead is a perfect example. I think he has plenty of interesting things to say, but his jargon is very difficult to understand, at least in Process and Reality.
It's probably wiser to tackle complex texts, such as Critique of Pure Reason and Process and Reality by reading secondary analyses first. The latter is also obscure in my view: Whitehead's notion of God has remained ineluctably ambiguous to me. Which is not to say I think it to be without worth.
Sounds like a you problem.
Might I suggest a time management app? We have those too now.
I entirely agree with your analysis. There's also the aspect of being cryptic, which is somewhat different from obscurity which is found numerous times in Wittgenstein. This too has much value. I think Heidegger's obscurity can be valuable on occasion too.
But I do think it's person dependent, in terms of getting value of certain philosophers. Some get lots of value from Levinas others from Quine or Carnap. Likewise with Derrida or Husserl or Hegel. It's not even that continental is obscure whereas analytic is clear, that's often not true.
I'm aware that this criticism of saying someone is obscure for the sake of it is bound to be controversial. I think this is clear with Lacan. Derrida's style is not for me at all.
A distinction which is now blurred in modern gender studies, queer studies, fat studies, etc. i.e. the industry of grievience studies stemming from Pomo.
I note the absence of factuality / empirical evidence in your list... Was that intentional?
Do you have a sort of person in mind? Scientists should use the scientific method. In my view more things should take a scientific approach. But it can't be forced on people.
Quoting ssu
I was talking from the scientist's point of view. Science rolls on pretty merrily amid, for instance, every thread you've seen on here declaring that science doesn't work! It's pretty resilient. Which only makes it more unwise to go off on one when it is criticised. The threat of 'science being undermined' was just never credible imo.
Quoting ssu
I don't think postmodernism is aiming to take over the running of the state and, if it did, my principle concern wouldn't be for the health of scientific research. Postmodernism concerns discourse. Religion's need to dominate and crush doesn't obviously translate.
Good question. I don't think the difference generally lies in the form the criticism might take, although I think certain preoccupations are present, such as a) whether the narrative science uses to describe itself is apt, it b) whether a given scientific narrative is biased. I'd say probably the stance/motive of the critic and their methodology in reaching their criticism is more what makes it pomo. What do you think?
That was precisely Sokal's position, that pomo does NOT represent a significant threat to science at all. Rather, he saw it as corrosive to the credibility and sanity of the political left, as I think @Josh said already.
Yeah I kind of figured this is where you were going. So all along you were asking me what _my_ criteria were distinguishing between what _you_ consider sense and nonsense. Which is, of course, a nonsense question. I'm not here as a missionary; I'd rather listen to your argument as to why diversity is nonsense than try to convince you that it's not.
You see, you keep avoiding my question of what constitutes the boundaries of sensical discourse. It's hard for me to make sense to you if I don't know what makes sense to you.
And I'm sure he really understood that and didn't just say it to seem less petty. Nonetheless a) he was inspired to it by a pre-existing animosity toward criticism of scientific realism and scientific objectivity (Gross & Levitt), and b) since all his hoax proved is that a non-peer-reviewed journal isn't peer-reviewed, he clearly had no hopes of demonstrating much of anything at all. It seems like pure retaliation to me.
As I said dude, not here to change minds, just gathering thoughts. Your take is yours, and I don't really have any questions about it.
Starting from people studying the social sciences, which ought to use similar questioning, objectivity and try to refrain from subjectivity even if the answers cannot be gotten by performing laboratory tests as in the natural sciences. At least that I was taught in the university while studying economics and economic history.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And how was genetics in the Soviet Union with Trofim Lysenko? Prime example of what "politically correct" science becomes in the end: total bogus science with no scientific value. Lysenko's practices created literally famines. Lysenko stayed in "power" from 1940 to 1965, which basically stopped genetics research in the Soviet Union for the time.
And even if there is a very important debate to be had about what are the limits of good science, still, how many times in the US has the religious right made bans on science based on religious views? Let's not forget that the US is a country where the legislator in Indiana tried to get through the Pi Bill to get a legal court decision that it is possible to square the circle in 1897.
Doesn't matter that von Lindemann had proved this impossible in 1882 (and anybody with their right sense would notice the error). Even mathematics isn't off limits to politics and the American legislator.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Philosophical movements seldom have clear aims or objectives. Their impact comes from basically how they effect or alters the debate / discourse and just what kind of studies, investigations and research is done. What kind of research it crowds out. That still can have a major effect.
Once again I am not anti-pomo, I'm rather sympathetic to a lot of what they say. I just think it is unwise to reject empirical validation (or refutation) as it turns philosophy into a freewheeling imaginative discourse. I see the idea by Rorty et aliquem (e.g. Quine, so it was not just a pomo idea) that we should dispose of a representationalist account of knowledge and language as literally beyond philosophy and science, as an invitation to treat philosophy and science as just another branch of scifi.
Then I'm glad you've got the pomo state on your list of concerns, saves me the hassle. The third quote in your response answers your reply to the second, so I'll leave that.
Quoting ssu
This seems to be the sort of totalitarianism of metanarrative that's in dispute. I'm not sure that can be the answer. If the objection is that it's called 'science' (however soft), yeah I agree.
Quoting Olivier5
If your objection is to the "science is a social construct" line, I have bad news for you. Science is most definitely a social construct. Personally this doesn't injure my ego any: I had no illusions that science was anything other than something people do, disseminated via language. Perhaps your conception is closer to divine revelation.
In terms of literature, scientists also call it "the literature", but more broadly "text" doesn't just mean words.
Not only do I agree with you that empirical validation is essential, I'd say that postmodernism has nothing at all to say about facts generally, and Rorty agrees. It only concerns texts, including texts about facts. If facts are critical -- and we agree that they are -- then it is all the more important that we minimise the bullshit in our narratives about those facts. This is why people like Kuhn and Latour are important. Irrespective of their bullshit, they did out us on ours.
Because postmodernism is centred around diverse discourse, it doesn't really matter about a particular piece of pomo BS. Scientific BS is much more important to science though.
What according to you then is the scientific method?
Or you think the scientific method is a totalitarian metanarrative? Very postmodernist.
LOL. Evidently science is a social construct, but
it is constructed via a certain method, which combines observations, hypotheses building aka modeling, and sharing and critiquing. Not everything goes. One has to anchor one's models in observations aka facts.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ok, I edited my text to say scifi instead of literature.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This I agree with. That is precisely the value of Pomo to me: to make scientists (and others) better aware of the permanent presence of cultural a priori and biases in their own mind, as unsaid, unarticulated présuppositions, as these permeates their work more that they sometime should. Hence I am also totally in favour of diversity at school, work and politics, including in my own work.
No time now but intends to bring a piece of historical data to buttress your OP sometime later.
Yes.
Engineering is a social construct too.
Go tell that to engineers, btw. :joke:
Ha ha thanks I think? No, as I said above, imo Lyotard confused an algorithm for a narrative. I'm not making the same mistake. The narrative here is that science is the best and only way to do anything, and so social studies and science studies should be scientific, right? That's a totalitarian metanarrative (as Lyotard would have it, and I'd agree).
Quoting Olivier5
I agree. But the question is on how we interpret, discuss and represent those facts or, as Latour pointed out, how we ignore them if they're not the right facts. (Or in my area -- computational physics -- stop debugging when you get the right answer.)
Quoting Olivier5
Well that's one value, and one that science has done very well out of despite the Sokals of the world. But pomo isn't limited to science, it's any text or discourse.
I mean, would speaking about science be necessarily a narrative? It can take the form of a narrative, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. Describing what photons do when they hit the eye or why the Earth goes around the sun is an explanation of observable facts.
Yes, I'd agree that the stance and methodology a person takes is what makes them fit into a specific group of people or school of thought. This however doesn't clear up why postmodern lenses are an improvement over mitigated skepticism, for example.
If you want to go beyond science to other aspects of life, like culture and society, then I could see why postmodernism might be more useful as it is broader than skepticism.
You're hitting on precisely the sort of thing we have to be careful about. I've recycled this story a lot on here but I find it genuinely insightful and I like to share the love.
There was a conference quite a few years ago that aimed toward a sort of state-of-the-nation for physics. One of the questions to cover was: What is a photon? The answer the conference reached was: A photon is a click in a photon detector.
That's how you make sure you're speaking of facts, not theories. I found this distinction really important as a postgrad, it's rather helped define my outlook and is probably partly the reason why I, with a physics background, am somewhat receptive to pomo.
That a photon exists in spacetime between its creation event and its destruction event is a story we tell ourselves. It's a very good story, and may well approximate reality better than any other story we ever tell ourselves about photons, but it also might not be true.
Empirical facts like clicks in photon detectors or observations of bodies in the solar system are not stories, it's true, but they have to be communicated and that _is_ a story, and as part of the scientific method they should feed back into theory and that too is a story.
I see a click in a photon detector but that's not science. Consensus about facts is necessary. Or, at least, I need to tell a good enough story to convince an editor and two referees that consensus is obtainable such that I wouldn't lie about it.
The story I tell about a scientific fact, e.g. that I heard a click in a photon detector, might be trivially undone by three lab assistants saying that there was no click. It's my story against theirs. I might know they're lying, but I might be lying, or mistaken. Ultimately we have to narrate.
Quoting Manuel
I don't think it has to be an improvement in terms of a particular criticism, but the idea is that we have diverse discourses each sceptical about each other, which ought to yield diverse criticisms, not just of science but science criticism. Also if we're counting deconstruction, which I think we should, it is an improvement to have another methodology by which to do so.
And occasionally, thanks to the Sokals of this world. As you recognized, it's important to minimize the level of bullshit. It cuts both ways: humanities can occasionally humble scientists and scientists (such as Sokals) can occasionally humble humanities... :-)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sure. Even Derrida himself can be deconstructed.
Pretty much everything on earth is. Even the landscape in most places is anthropic.
:up: And therein lies p0m0's self-subsuming self-refutation just like relativism, global skepticism, nihilism – categorical deflations, or negations, which necessarily apply to themselves as well. Derrida deferred.
I can see why you say we have to be careful in this specific area. I don't have my mind made up on this topic, and you would know more about the actual details than I would.
Nevertheless, it's not completely clear to me that when we communicate to other people on what a photon does we are telling a story. We may be, but not necesarilly.
Yes, you are right, future discoveries might point out that what's actually going on is not that photons are hitting a detector but "Ztons", a smaller component we had not been able to discover.
It looks to me as if you are describing what you see to a person or an audience when you speak of photons hitting detectors, the issue is if descriptions are stories.
But I can also well see the point that when submitting an article to a journal, it becomes a story of sorts. So I think that much of this hinges on how ample we take stories to be.
Fair enough on deconstruction.
Right. Of course, who here is saying that science is the only way to do anything, Kenosha Kid?
Absolutely nobody.
A literary novel can depict history well, but it's not history, however well the imaginary characters might be based on and describe actual people, events and historical times. There's still the obvious difference of the author using his or her imagination or trying to explain what happened in reality. Yes, art can depict reality, but that doesn't make it science or an academic study. And nobody should have any problem with this.
The basic problem in my view is that postmodernism is basically criticism of something depicted vaguely as modernism, yet unfortunately to understand it one should first clearly know and understand what is criticized in the first place. That usually is what is missing.
Hence here is the giant pitfall where the academia can fall into and has fallen into: that this so-called "modernism" isn't taught at all, it's only criticized. Because if what you are taught only is what Foucault, Derrida and etc. have written without starting from those "age old white men from the Enlightenment" (as how they are depicted sometimes) you hardly can put the criticism into a proper context. Yet the university student who has come from high school / the gymnasium is wired to take in the lessons just like he or she did it in the seventh grade and ready to regurgitate the proper line from the proper author.
Far too easily, and I can remember this from decades ago, the student who had studied contemporary social history (with postmodernism or similar ideas) would use the observation that "science is a social construct" as a refutation, something that questions a scientific hypothesis.
Just like when you KK says that "social studies and science studies should be scientific" is "a totalitarian metanarrative", many might think of that as a criticism, because "totalitarianism" doesn't seem to go well with the open mindedness and curiosity that science should have. It sounds negative, something you should avoid.
Of course for some, at least me, the sentence "social studies and science studies should be scientific" is simply a tautology. A sentence like "birds are animals" would have an equally "totalitarian metanarrative" going far back to Aristotle.
Tell me what you think the relation is between science and the progress of knowledge , and then compare it with your sense of whether philosophy progresses and if so , how is this progress different from the progress of science. Once i get a sense of your views on this matter, I can expand the terrain to include the arts and literature.
Aping Mankind, The Knowing Animal, On The Edge of Certainty, Epimethean Imaginings are all good for intro stuff.
Not that he has anything much more complex, just longer or more specialized in terms of topics.
Oh, I'm a boring type. I think science is a method: the use of the scientific method.
Philosophy and science? I've sometime even myself heard scientists say, when their guard is down, that they aren't interested so much in philosophy, they just do science. Of course, then their scientific philosophy view is there in the age of Enlightenment (which likely they don't know) and they likely won't understand Kant or any philosopher after Kant. But, if you don't take the Philosophy course 1.0, you then don't take it.
Quoting Joshs
Science uses the same method again and again. Philosophy looks back at what has been pondered in philosophy and builds on that. Hence the German romanticism or even postmodernism are quite logical ways to try to think about reality in a different way. Yet many times these new ideas don't overthrow anything that has become before, even if some people think that they have done so.
Quoting 180 Proof
I was hoping to come onto this. If one can deconstruct Of Grammatology, does that mean one cannot deconstruct Of Grammatology? Is "One cannot deconstruct Of Grammatology" a possible reading of Of Grammatology?
I think the accusation that pomo is self-refuting isn't that well thought out. Another example: is postmodernism a totalitarian narrative? In other words, can an argument for a diversity of discourses be a dominating discourse? I'd say: only if you're doing it wrong.
The mosquitoes near my house are very misanthropic, and I have red lumpy legs to prove it.
Quoting ssu
Then you lost me here:
Quoting ssu
Quoting ssu
I'll be honest, if we're talking the worst of pomo anti-science, of which there is a lot, I'm not sure there's even a lot of interest. Saying that E=mc^2 is an androcentric, misogynistic narrative for favouring the male lightspeed over more feminine constant speeds isn't exactly trying to engage with the field. It's just pointing at things and shouting MONSTERS!!! aka feminism.
But that's not true of Kuhn, Latour, people like that who actually studied science or studied scientists in situ.
I do wonder though how well deconstruction works on something that requires specialist knowledge of a difficult field. Do you include the bibliography or not? Technically you shouldn't, but then how can you follow the text? Might make an interesting exercise. I'd say that keeping an open mind about a text means being able to approach it from all angles, including a scientific one. But it doesn't follow that you have to be doing science to critique science.
Quoting ssu
Then already you have a scarcity of discourse. If that is the state of social studies across universities, then it seems we have a totalitarian metanarrative on our hands :yikes:
Quoting ssu
But likewise you'll still find today people who see "science is a social construct" as a blasphemy or assault. Whatever their view of science is, that really is refuted. Including by me, pomo or no pomo #nopomo
"The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.”
? Christopher Hitchens
"Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives."
? Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
Note Lyotard's use of the word 'incredulity' rather than, say, 'skepticism'.
It's fairly obvious that people who prefer prose to have Orwellian clarity (an English bias, perhaps) dislike postmodernism on the basis that meaning is hard enough to convey without the use of jargon and needlessly convoluted theoretical language. It's also clear some people appreciate the complex language and theoretical conceits viewing this as part of the post-modern process and praxis.
Postmodernism has contributed to making certainty problematic and this generates enemies, especially amongst conservatives (in the broadest sense of this word) who rely upon sacred presuppositions to support their worldview.
What I'd be interested to hear is how post-modernism has changed people's thinking or enhanced their experience of art/culture/philosophy/knowledge in any way.
Well, that is the actual worry.
It's not something absolutely horrifying as Lysenkoism, which was really literally totalitarian with a genuine totalitarian narrative, it's just simply lousy academic work. Still, lousy, mediocre academic work can have bad effects. It won't create famines like Lysenkoism did, but still.
I remember my professor sighing deeply when someone of her students had the idea of make their Masters about something to do with Foucault. Those degree works would just take time and more time. (But that was a quarter of a Century ago, so I have no idea how it is now, just have some educated guesses.)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, you do find those types too. Those are the ones who get angry at you if you refer to philosophy when they are talking about science. Usually they, as sometimes happens here in PF, simply assume to know already where the discussion is going when the words "social construct" are uttered, and they assume they have to take a stance to defend their cherished science. It's no wonder strawman arguments are so popular.
There was bad prose prior to postmodernism. Just look at German Idealism or the Cambridge Platonists and many others. The problem here is the content behind the obscurity. If there is content, then the obscurity can be tolerated, if there isn't or if there is very little content, obscurity serves no purpose. But I know some think that the writing itself already indicates "different modes of thought". Okay.
As to your question, all one can do is to look at postmodern art. Consider Warhol's paintings, Pynchon's prose and much of contemporary "literary theory". I can't speak for other people, but I personally enjoy Warhol's paintings and I think Pynchon is excellent.
However, I'm not a fan of "literary theory", I don't see any "theory" worthy of the name. As to a broader cultural impact, that's hard to say. I think it mostly leads to bad writing, rather than good art, but pomo can lead to both.
One significant effect in the arts was to open up the field to a new kind of eclecticism, once the modernist obsession with formal innovation had run its course.
I agree; it's a matter of personal taste, just as it is with literature. I don't look at philosophy as a whole as one system or conceptual schema refuting others at all, but as a myriad of ways of imagining and understanding things. It is the exercise of Peirce's 'abductive reasoning' to produce theories that may not be able to be tested in the way scientific theories may be.
Yes, if they can be tested, then you have a better philosophy or system that should be clear.
As an aside, I also think it's interesting to see what system most convinces you, evidence aside. Which is to say that things like idealism, physicalism, skepticism, determinism etc., can't be refuted (or confirmed) by evidence, only evaluated based on reasoning.
In the end it is as you say "a myriad of ways of imagining and understanding things".
In p0m0, meaning^ is indefinite yet socially de/constructable. Interpretation (narration) and irony (ambiguity).
MoDo – gradual / radical essays in (attempts at) emanicipation from cultural-socioeconomic enchantments, mystifications, reifications, etc – is also the problem of (with) MoDo and thereby p0m0 functions only as a 'fashionable' synecdoche^, or tedious exercise in philosophical parody.
My question for the apologists: What has p0m0 proposed in philosophy that e.g. atomists, skeptics, kynics, freethinkers, anarchists, fallibilists, critical rationalists or absurdists have not already proposed more clearly, cogently and also that is less co-optable – commodifiable – by late capitalism (i.e. Neoliberal "post-truth" populism)? Asking for an old friend. :cool:
On the contrary, your red lumpy legs indicate that mosquitoes like you quite a lot.
It's all about the blood, the blood, baby. :wink:
No 2 of 7 reasons why mosquitoes love you.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/reason-mosquitoes-bite-some-people-more-others-4858811
Nothing about attacks on post-modernists ?
Unless they are hot, sweaty, heavy-breathing beer drinkers with lively skin.
Or are pregnant :scream:
That's a question that resonates both with the current post-truth moment and with the little piece of philosophy history I have wanted to add to the puzzle.
It's about structuralism or rather, since I never thought very highly of the term 'structuralism', about the contribution of Claude Lévi-Strauss and more broadly ethnology to the issue of cultural diversity vs. universalism.
You started your OP on the following para:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The OP goes on to describe a broad historical arch, in which (in short) the horrors of the two world wars led to a form of western self-disgust, to spreading doubts in said metanarratives, and to decolonization. Pomo would have diagnosed this historical condition, or alternatively reenforced it.
I agree with your description and congratulate you for it. Nice synthesis. But I think an important piece is missing between WW2 and the rise of Pomo: the story of Levi-Strauss' interactions with and contributions to UNESCO on the issues of racism after WW2.
When you speak of the horrors of the two world wars, you mean (or I hear) the horrors of racism, ultra nationalism, and the Holocaust: the mobilisation of science and technology to murder entire nations on an industrial scale.
We must remember that racism was politically correct before WW2, and politically useful in justifying colonisation. Many European scientists, philosophers, medical doctors, political activists etc. before WW2 were casually racist. The 'white race' was typically seen as the pinacle of human genetic evolution, and Europe as the pinacle of cultural evolution. Other 'races' and nations were seen as evidently inferior, genetically and/or culturally, reason for which Europe was able to colonize them. That metanarrative was fundamentally ethnocentrism and racist, and a lot of European academics - right or left - were just fine with it, not just Heidegger.
Yet WW1 had already put a dent on it. Ergo dadaism and surrealism can be seen as reactions against grand but bloody nationalistic, colonial and scientistic discourses. E.g. the love of 'native arts' by the surrealists is a way of saying: "Europe is full of itself but Africans are artists too, 'savages' have an important culture too."
By that time, between the two WW, ethnographers / anthropologists were starting to say the same thing. It was a science which originally had served colonisation well: the colonizer needed to understand the colonized, in order to better control and rule him, and ethnographers were commissioned to do this decrypting of the colonized. There was also the idea that ancestral customs would disappear quite fast thanks to colonization and you know, the inevitable progress of the one and unique form of civilization (European). So these ancient customs had to be documented before they disappear.
The problem was, these people (ethnographers) often fell in awe with the cultures they were documenting. And many of them started to argue against colonization. Leiris is a case in point.
All this changed radically after the Holocaust. Racism was suddenly seen as downright evil, and the very concept of race was being redefined or denied validity. The recently created United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO), headquartered in Paris, saw this fight against racism as it main mission.
In the early 1950's UNESCO published its statement on race as a social construct and the essay Race and History by Claude Lévi-Strauss. LS had contributed to the UNESCO statement on race, together with other scientists and academics. Two decades later, in 1971 Levi Strauss gave a conference at UNESCO entitled Race and Culture, which made a nice little scandal.
Historically this sequence fits right in between WW2 and the rise of Pomo in the late 60's. (There's an epilogue in 2005 but it doesn't add much, it's a mere confirmation of points already made in 52 and 71). The story is analysed in some detail here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4326674/
The two papers (Race and History + Race and Culture) competently build upon modern genetics and ethnography, and draw the same broad picture of a world threatened by a fake form of universalism.
TBC...
I am reading this thread for the first time. I admit to never understanding or concerning myself with postmodernism.
Perhaps I have absorbed the 'era' without even realising it, or giving it a label.
As to the values listed here, they can't all have been the consequence of Pomo alone, could they ?
Then why do they want to change me?!?
Quoting 180 Proof
Is this true? Did Descartes think that reason was inadequate? Did Leibniz, Spinoza? I'm sure there's exceptions you'll know better than I, but I expect your inadequacy of reason is coming in at Kant, who is precisely who conservative philosophers blame for the alleged death knell of modernism and midwifery of pomo.
Quoting 180 Proof
It's a nice story, but do you like horror stories too? Cultural-socioeconomic enchantments like Marx? The terror? The technological Utopia? Reifications like Freud? How about spiritualism? The pomo-vs-modernism debate boils down to picking and choosing to forward some story, like a defense attorney versus the prosecution. Referring to your next point, (attempts at) getting beyond that seem justification enough.
Quoting 180 Proof
Since you didn't like my last answer, I'll do you one better and make it the subject of the next thread. This one was about whether or not the postmodern era ever happened. The results of the poll seem pretty static now and no one is backing up the argument that it didn't, or the anachronistic argument that pomo caused it. So the next question for me is: do we need a postmodern philosophy (irrespective of the one we got) which will naturally involve looking at the one we got.
It's not just the Holocaust that changed minds about race in WWII. The US armed forces, for instance, were forced to have black and white people fighting side by side, which helped a bit. (Not the ones that got killed, obviously.)
I agree with the influence of anthropology. CLS made it quite rock-'n'-roll so it had a broader impact than just other academics.
As for the interwar years generally, yes, that makes sense to me as I've mentioned a couple of times. The French existentialists were also sexy (not literally, urgh! Except Camus. Even I'd let him do me) pop cultural icons that had a genuine impact on "real" people.
This is precisely why I put in option 2 in the poll: I think a lot of people think of postmodernism as post-everything social constructivists WHO ARE RUINING EVERYTHING when a) they're not nearly free enough from their own metanarratives to qualify and b) postmodernism is first and foremost a description of the present in context of the past, and only after that a prescription (can't be a totalitarian proscription) for the future.
I called them and they confirmed that they want you to stay exactly as you are. The red lumps are but a minor side effect to their accessing your blood stream; hope you don't mind too much. Thanks for your continued support to their reproduction cycle.
My own diagnostic is more pessimistic: I believe that any school or tradition of philosophy that captures enough of the public's and academia's attention is liable to degenerescence over time, due to too much security and not enough challenge. Power corrupts. Money, or automatic tenure too. German idealism, English analytic philosophy, 'French theory', they all fell victim to their own academic success.
- As if postmodernist would be.
Quoting Olivier5
Put this another way: when some school of philosophy becomes popular enough, a lot of mediocre and simply bad academicians jump on the bandwagon making it stupid.
:100:
:up:
I like entertaining any and all of those positions to see where they logically lead, but if I was asked to say what I would definitely commit to, I think the one position which is true to our actual situation, epistemologically speaking, is skepticism.
I think overconfidence in one position or another is a prevalent intellectual failing that grows out of the common emotional incapacity to live with uncertainty. In my view the richer intellectual life is "grounded" in uncertainty, because uncertainty opens the mind.
I think philosophical positions generally are not testable; which means philosophy is more art than science.
Quoting Olivier5
I think this diagnosis is relevant only to the "populist" followers of the schools you mentioned; it has no bearing on the seminal thinkers.
He did. Let me come back to what he was saying about race, and how it is relevant to postmodernism and to your question about how it could ever become a dominating discourse.
According to Wiktor Stoczkowski, a historian of anthropology, the two contributions by CLS to the debate on racism under the aegis of UNESCO were perfectly coherent. The basic message was that collaboration between different civilizations is the engine of history.
(my translation from: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000005546 -- see also https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-2010-4-page-485.htm for an article by Wiktor Stoczkowski on the topic)
The main argument of Lévi-Strauss’ Race et histoire in 1952 — namely that human progress is linked to a universal “aptitude … to establish mutual exchanges with others” — lined up well with the ideology of cooperation, whose propagation UNESCO wished to promote. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss’ 1971 intervention emphasized "the right of every culture to remain deaf to the values of the Other" as a condition for cultural creativity, and this clashed with the programme of “educational action on a world-wide scale” that UNESCO wanted to deploy to combat racism. Hence the scandal.
Lévi-Strauss was therefore fighting at UNESCO for the rights of the 'primitive' to be left alone by Western civilization, to be protected from it (including from UNESCO itself). He prophetized that globalization - if it was to result in one unique world culture - would kill human creativity, precisely because he saw exchanges between different culture as positive.
The paradox he highlighted in his argument was that ethnocentrism is universal. Each culture believes it is 'special' and 'better' than the others, at least in certain ways. And each culture tries to preserve itself, while incorporating interesting elements from other cultures. This is not a bad thing. Rather, it is the sine qua non condition for future creativity, for the historical agency of nations and cultures.
This lead CLS to both appreciate cultural 'métissage' as an engine of 'progress' or at least evolution (CLS did not actually believe in progress) and yet to warn against too much cultural 'métissage', as it could destroy cultural diversity.
Nowadays, everybody is familiar with the need to protect cultural diversity. But as the pendulum has moved away from universalism, the need for exchange and métissage between cultures is now de-emphasized. It's called 'cultural appropriation' and is seen as a bad thing. This is obviously a pretense, a form of hypocrisy, and one that CLS did not appreciate one bit. Today's 'metanarrative' is that the West is (by default) wrong and guilty, and other cultures are always right and wonderful. All the while, Western capitalism is destroying the planet and our common future, and those academics who meekly condemn Western cultures bask in the limelight of their self-disgust and enjoy the material comfort they provide... It's downright obscene.
:up: There's some truth in that!
Ha. I guess I should not be surprised that people here defend it as an advancement in philosophy. But it's not clear if it says something new that's not terminological in nature: "metanarratives", "episteme", etc.
I suppose I'd like to know what has replaced it, post-post modernism?
Seems to me modernism never finished...
:up: Right, PM is just a passing moment in the self-reflective sub-processes of modernism, or better, modernity.
What we need now is what Lévi-Strauss might have labelled post-humanism: the understanding that the human race is its worst enemy, that it was a mistake to cast ourselves outside of nature, that we are animals and depend on other animals and plants, that our future survival as a civilization is threatened by too much emphasis on human needs and fancies, and not enough respect for other species' right for survival.
The present century will be when the CO2 shit hits the climatic fan. We don't have much time.
Yeah, in other words, MoDo hasn't attained its "final vocabulary" (Rorty's p0m0 – no shit, big whup) yet, and isn't this (contra pre-MoDo 'scriptural infallibility' & 'scholastic dogma') what makes MoDo MoDo? Hey Derrida et al: nothing significantly new in "your texts" about texts, just interminably prolix, tedious, anti-philosophical jabberwocky in several (neoliberal) languages. A few decades of p0m0 hustling at MoDo's expense seems to have mostly played (sold) itself out ...
Does 'post-p0m0' even make sense? :smirk:
There's an apparent limit to obscurity. I just hope the next hip thing in philosophy is at least intelligible.
That said, I've been a "fan" of speculative realism for over a decade now which was once "the next thing" that was never really "hip" even though Žižek, etc talked it up for a while.
That's my impression too.
It's more difficult to gain a following if one speaks in plain sentences.
I agree, speculative realism and object oriented ontology are interesting and make sense in that the general ideas can be grasped. It's by now extremely hard to come up with some philosophical work that will "revolutionize" the field. But who knows?
Are you basing the second paragraph on your understanding in the first? Because it doesn't follow. CLS wasn't appealing to an innate ethnocentrism in isolated groups; he was compelling external societies to keep away for the sake of diversity. Ethnocentrism isn't the right conclusion here.
Quoting Olivier5
That's the obscene bit, not the destruction of the planet? This is another false dichotomy: you can't without hypocrisy criticise the extremes of Western capitalism and enjoy the bare minimum of it. Of course you can. It's not capitalism versus primitivism, it's unsustainable, destructive capitalism versus sustainable, green capitalism.
Or possibly: we can just redefine 'modernism' to mean whatever we need it to mean.
EDIT: Kind of analogous with lots of other isms: communism, Americanism, and even environmentalism (e.g. David Cameron redefining natural gas as not a fossil fuel).
An alternative term to 'postmodernism' is 'late modernism'. I'm not so interested in debating terminology, but if both sides agree that post-/late modernism occurred, and just disagree whether we're at a late stage of the same category or an early stage of a new one, given that either category and where it starts or ends is arbitrary, the sensible thing to do is compare the start of modernism with the disputed end/late stage. Otherwise we're in danger of confusing transition with some meaningless assertion of continuity.
There was a pessimistic vibe in CLS -- and a prescient one at that, having 70 years ago predicted ecological doom by way of overpopulation and overdevelopment -- which optimist humanists tended to hate, not see, or misrepresent.
CLS, Race et culture, 1971
Ethnocentrism is to be understood as the equivalent in ethnography of Enstein's relativism: any and all human being will perceive other cultures from the prism of her own culture, and will tend to defend and promote her own culture more often than not. It is a universal phenomenon.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The destruction of our environment is a tragedy, far worse than a mere obscenity.
Ah I think I misread you originally anyway, ignore me.